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| Boring cover, too |
This was a huge find at the hospital used bookstore. A first edition hardback of the US version of the sequel to Get Carter (okay, it's not the magna carta, but I was quite excited). I was not disappointed. Jack Carter is back at his home base, working for two bosses and demonstrating his panache and experience in the London underworld. One of his colleagues gets picked up by the cops (the "filth" as they call them) and Carter learns that he is getting ready to spill the beans on their entire operation. Carter's bosses skedaddle and he is left to deal with the problem, try and discover where the guy is being held and who else is behind this conspiracy (the police are so corrupt that a move like this could only be engineered by a rival).
I haven't read the first book, but I really want to now. The Carter here is very much like Michael Caine's Carter in the movie, tough and independent. We follow him around 60s criminal London to nightclubs, apartments, backroom card games, shady retail establishments. The milieu and the poetic snakey way we explore it with Carter makes for some very satisfying reading. The criminals and the crimes they commit are also very entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
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